How to Earn Extra/Passive Income as a Techie

There is a famous saying by Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam, “Love your job not your company, because you may not know when your company stops loving you”.

It is always better to have income streams other than your regular day job. In this blog, I will explain various ways you can earn extra income or a passive income as a techie.

As passionate techies, we all have one thing in common. We like to learn and experiment with new tools and technologies. All you have to do is just turn this passion into money.

Whenever I meet people I will always tell them to turn their passion into money. However, they get motivated at that time and loose their interest the next day. So one thing that you need, if you want to make extra income, is “perseverance“. There is no overnight success. You need to work smart and work hard to make something happen. Behind every successful person, there is a lot of sacrifices and hard work. You make your own luck by taking action and working hard.

According to me, there is no such thing as failure. If you succeed, it is a success and if you fail, it is learning. And taking action pays you in one way or the other.

Earn Extra/Passive Income as a Techie

As a techie, I have used the following ways to earn extra income. Everything I did took some time to yield results and all the failures taught me a good lesson to do things right the next time.

1. Blogging

As a techie, you would have read a lot of blogs written by other people. Have you ever thought of having one for yourself?. Writing blogs is a great way of sharing the knowledge, learning new things and connecting with like-minded people online.

Next question you would have is, can you make a passive income through blogging? The answer is yes! And there is no limit to how much money you can make through blogging. There are bloggers who make more than $100000 per month from blogging. They are full-time bloggers and they have really worked hard to reach that level.

Apart from money, blogging creates an online identity for you. It will help boost your career as well.

Paid Product Reviews – When new products get launched, they might contact relevant bloggers in their niche for reviewing their product. And yes, you can get paid for that.

One thing that you need to keep in mind is that blogging requires consistency. You cannot create just ten articles and wait for it to generate money. You need to consistently create quality, user engaging content.

To get started with blogging, you need to have a domain name and a self-hosted WordPress hosting. There are many free blogging platforms, however, it is better to self-host your blogging platform using WordPress as it is very customizable. Moreover, we are techies, its always good to start with little technical work 😉

2. Authoring An eBook

If you can explain complex concepts in an easy to understandable way, you should definitely give a try writing a book. With platforms like Amazon Kindle publishing, you can easily self-publish your book on Amazon. You can start by writing getting started guides for a technology you work with. My suggestion would be, always go for the latest programming language guide or a tool guide (mainly open source).

You can start by writing getting started guides for a technology you work with. My suggestion would be, always go for the latest programming language guide or a tool guide (mainly open source).

I have co-authored a technical eBook and self-published it on Amazon during the second year of my career and I promoted the book on relevant LinkedIn groups. I was able to make decent money by selling e-books. Also, it gave me more confidence to write more books.

Also, you can try publishing platforms like Packt, Leanpub, Apress, etc. You can send them a draft of your writing and if they like it, you can publish the book on their platform.

3. Create A Video Course

Creating video courses on platforms like Udemy is a great source of passive income for techies. You can upload your videos courses for completely free on Udemy and you can sell your courses for an amount you choose.

For every paid subscription to your courses, you will get 70% sale amount and Udemy will take 30% as commission. It is a great deal because your course will be visible to millions of Udemy users. Also, If your course gets a good user rating, many Udemy partners will promote your courses on their own blogs and websites.

I am in the process of creating a video course on WordPress cloud hosting. I am using Goanimate for explainer video and Camtasia for screencasting and video editing. Both software are awesome for creating good video courses.

4. Freelancing

Being a part-time freelancer is another way of earning some side income. You can search for freelance gigs related to your domain in sites like freelancer.com, upwork.com etc.

Blogging is another great way to get freelance gigs. Blogs show your authority on your domain. I have got freelance gigs through my blogs. People would see the blog post that I have written and they mail me to know if I can get the work done for them.

Being active in Linked and Linkedin groups, Facebook groups are other ways of getting freelance gigs. Either share your blog post that solves a problem or interesting and informative articles from other websites. By doing so you can network with people in your domain and people would contact you for part-time freelance gigs.

Also, create your own Linkedin and Facebook groups. Share interesting content consistently and people will join the group eventually. I started a Linkedin group with 0 members and now it has grown to more than 37000+ members. Same with a Facebook group that has grown to more than 8000+ members.

Conclusion

I have explained the proven ways that you could earn some extra/passive income as a techie. I have explained all the ways that I have tried and worked for me. There are many other ways you can earn a legitimate side income based on your talent.

For example, some techies are good artists and photographers. They can sell their pics on sites like Shutterstock. All you have to do is spend 2 hrs a day doing things that you are really interested in.

I have seen people working for more than 12 hrs (Myself Included¯\_(ツ)_/¯) a day for the company even when the company pays them only for 8 hrs. I am not saying you shouldn’t work hard for your company or your career goals but work on things that you really like doing and that will help you even if you lose your job. And you don’t know, sometimes the side hustles might turn into big business for you.